A Quick Way For You To Know What Your Home Is Worth

06 Sep A Quick Way For You To Know What Your Home Is Worth

I frequently get asked to evaluate the worth of a person’s home. A lot of time and effort goes into determining the monetary value of a home, and I take this process extremely serious. With that being said, I’ll show you a quick tip on how to value your home yourself. Keep in mind that you will need a professional to come over and do this for you if you are thinking about selling. This process is just to give you a ball park number, so that, you can do an evaluation of your home to see if: 1) someone is being honest/fair in their pricing, 2) to help you appropriately manage expectations.

CAUTION: never take serious what Zillow, Trulia, Red Fin or any other real estate sites opinion of what the value of your home is. I’ve never had a case where these sites have been accurate and they are always tens of thousands of dollars off.

First Step: find a comparable

Comparable’s are homes that are similar to your home and have sold (or are currently in escrow) in the past six months. What you should look for when comparing your home with a comparable is: the size (living sq ft and lot sq ft), bedrooms, bathrooms, number of stories, interior and exterior condition, and lastly it has to be in the same neighborhood. All things must match in order to use this method.

Second Step: what’s the condition:

This step is the hardest for a homeowner to truly evaluate. If your doing a comparable you must go in with a non biased eye and really be honest with yourself. The condition of the comparable home’s interior and exterior and your home must match; no exceptions. You cannot accurately do the sq ft calculation (listed below) if you cannot accurately find a home with similar conditions. Cost per square foot of a home is effected by upgrades or lack their of, so if your home is more upgraded then a comparable that you found (or vice versa), then do not do the calculation or you will be getting less money for your home. This mistake could also lead to an over valuing of your home which will result in longer days on the market (a home depreciates each day that it is up for sale), which in turn, will lead to less money for your biggest asset.

Now, this is how you calculate the value of your home.

SIZE: This is probably the most important factor. The comparable must match the living square footage of your home. This will give you a number of cost per sq ft. You take the number of living sq ft and divide it by how much the house was bought for. This will give you the cost per sq ft the home sold for.

Example: if a home was purchased for $1,000,000 and the living sq ft is 3000 sq ft then the owner of the home payed $333.33 per sq ft. If your home is 3100 sq ft, and in the same condition, how much should you receive? $333.33 X 3100 sq ft = $1,033,323.

You can only use this calculation if the condition of the homes are the same or extremely similar, along with the same number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

If you are wondering what your home is worth, or would like to buy/sell a Huntington Beach or Orange County home, Click “Lets Get Started”. I would love to go over, in detail, what I could do for you to make that process as stress free and enjoyable as possible.